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Hi, thanks so much for taking the time to comment. Also, I appreciate the honesty of your suggestion very much and have taken a few days thinking over it. I'm about to drop some personal relfections on this whole project and behind the scenes stuff and it may be kind of a lot, I hope you won't feel obligated to read it all, but it'll be here for anyone interested or that could learn from my mistakes.

I'm still undecided whether to take your suggestion on board. Here's where I'm at:

• Price remains the same, zero to a few further purchases: Admission that the project is a commercial failure.
• Price decrease, zero new purchases: Project is definitely a commercial failure, no loss.
• Price decrease, a handful of new purchases: Project is a commercial failure, and I'll be kicking myself wondering if they'd have purchased without the lowered price - I think this is the most likely outcome (will explain why soon)
• Price decrease, many new purchases: Great! But unless this blows up it's never going to be a sustainable source of income enough that I could quit my job and dedicate all of my time to this. (The same is probably true of the current price too though...)

Reducing the price also seems unfair on the few users that have purchased this Pro version.

Much as I don't want to, I have to admit that PolyOne3 was publishedin the wrong place at the wrong time (I don't think there is or ever has been a right place, hmm). Back when I started working on it Unity and Unreal weren't hugely powerful and popular dev tools that provided everything that was needed out of the box. Well, maybe less so Unity now, considering unfortunate things...

If this all looks like it's focused on financial sustainability, that wasn't originally the case. I feel compelled to give some context to the development of PolyOne3 that will hopefully explain that:

I moved back in with my parents when covid hit, simultaneously quitting my tech job because that was seriously damaging my mental health. If there was any time where things aligned best for me to get PolyOne3 "done", it was then. So I attempted self employment, but unfortunately my parents have no understanding of tech industry or what I was trying to do so I was under pressure from them to make PolyOne3 financially viable. I crunched my own project so hard to release the Pro edition that I stopped enjoying working on it or really anything else creative, hoping to justify the whole thing to them financially, but it amounted to next to nothing.

But none of this is to say anyone else is to blame for the financial failure of PolyOne3. In addition to publishing at the wrong time, I invested too much into a single huge project and didn't "fail fast" or read the market. I spent 8 years fitting working on prequels to PolyOne3 around tech jobs that involved more programming, the times moved but I stayed where I was and didn't read the writing on the wall. Don't make the same mistake as me, folks.

The rest of the consideration for financial viability just comes from when I wanted to be able to work on it full time and make it an incredible development tool that I would've used in my own projects. I have other self-learned skills that have been more lucrative in a few months than PolyOne3 Pro has been in 2 years! I also moved out of my parents' place again and had to get a tech job again to afford rent. I would love to live in a world where I could give this tool the love I originally envisioned, but it's difficult to justify because of the constraints of this underwhelming facade over reality that we call capitalism.

It's tragic to think how many other developers may be in similar circumstances yet without the luxury of more lucrative alternatives.

I'd love to list what I developed my projects with in the metadata, but getting a tip to do so is unhelpful when my core development tool isn't listed. I suggested it to be added but that went nowhere.

So it's regrettably been a while since a PolyOne3 update to either the Pro or Lite versions. Life, burnout and the need to work for a roof over my head got in the way. Furthermore, I had a version that was nearly ready for release, but experienced a hard disk issue and much of my work was corrupted. I had an external backup drive but it was also broken, and the source files of PolyOne3 do not fit well with Source Control, so I lost all the changes, obviously very discouraging.

Well I'm finally trying to get back to work on PolyOne3 starting with a .obj export and a rewrite of the manual focused on How-To's and Q&A as a manual rewrite seems much more useful for someone that wasn't inside my head seeing the thought process unfold behind all of how and why PolyOne3 was designed the way it is. I can't set a deadline on this for sure but a month should be sufficient.

I've had very little feedback on PolyOne3 and I worry that's because usability issues stop people from finding uses for it, so please let me know if or what you have found PolyOne3 useful for as I'd be very interested!

Hi, sorry for taking a few weeks to get back to you. 3D content is possible to create in the Lite version of PolyOne3, but much easier using custom properties in the Pro/full version.

If you only need a few levels of height (or in an imaginary Z-coordinate), you can get by like this:

1. Separate each Z-coordinate into its own layer, and include that Z-coordinate as a prefix or suffix in the layer name. You should probably use some character to separate it so you don't have any processing mishaps.
2. When processing your exported JSON file in your engine, assuming you're doing that, use the suffix/prefix in the layer name to determine which Z-coordinate you give the geometry in that layer.
3. In processing, you could also make it so that triangles where two vertices are at the same position create walls.

A couple of gotchas:

• PolyOne3 doesn't currently provide a way to rearrange the exported file data so that editor Y-coordinates go the vertsX or vice versa.
• If you need a .obj export or similar, PolyOne3 doesn't have a feature for that yet.

Thanks for your interest in PolyOne3!

I finally just released the first Pro version of my level editing software! It's highly versatile and the all-new Custom Properties feature only reinforces that, making it much easier to integrate with mechanics of your own games. It's on sale for the Winter Sale 2020 at 34% off.

It works well for creating organic, natural-looking environments, in a way which allows you to get more mileage out of existing textures, but also makes it well-suited to making maps for tabletop RPGs such as the below.

There is also a demo or free Lite version available which has no arbitrarily enforced limitations to number of layers, vertices etc. - the only things missing are features that were not yet developed for PolyOne3 Pro and all the core features are present.

Updates will be made available in a staggered fashion depending on how you support the project. If you buy on itch.io, it's a one-off fee but you will receive updates 2 months after the highest Patreon tier ($15/month) and 1 month after the middle tier ($10/month). The lowest tier does not get access to PolyOne3 pro, but only support priority via access to a private Discord server, so it would be best for anyone that either doesn't need the Pro version, or has paid the one-off fee and needs support.

If you have questions about the support model, how to use the software or whether it would work for your particular requirements, need to report a bug or anything else, you may also contact me on Twitter. In the latter case: there are a few bugs that I am aware of already and these are listed in the offline HTML manual that comes with the software and is accessible with F1 while using it.

Thanks for your time and whether you buy the full version, or will only be using the Lite version, I hope you'll have a great experience with the software!

¦:^) was funny